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Dessert

Cocoanut Cream Pie

A pie with a sweet coconut filling topped with meringue.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Corn and coconut match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 306 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Cocoanut Cream Pie

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the custard

  1. Heat the sweet milk in a saucepan.

  2. Thicken the milk with corn starch.

  3. Add the egg yolks, sugar, and flavoring to taste.

  4. Stir until very thick.

  5. Stir in the grated coconut.

Assemble and bake

  1. Spread the mixture in a pre-baked pie crust.

  2. Beat the egg whites with sugar until stiff to make meringue.

  3. Spread the meringue over the pie.

  4. Sprinkle with coconut.

  5. Brown the pie in a 400°F (200°C) oven.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Corn + coconuttop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together306 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Milk + coconuttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,648 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Milk + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  4. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Corn starch
Thickens the milk into a firm, sliceable custard as it heats.
Egg yolks
Enrich and thicken the custard, adding richness and a smooth texture.
Egg whites
Whipped with sugar to form the stiff meringue that tops the pie and browns in the oven.
Fresh grated coconut
Adds coconut flavor and texture to the custard and the topping.

The step that matters

Stir until very thick. Cornstarch must be fully heated while stirring to swell and gelatinize its granules; undercooked starch leaves the custard thin and runny once cooled and cut.

Swap the coconut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, corn, egg, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Coconutthe original
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Peachfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, corn, egg, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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